Time for a change

Just the thing to lift the tastebuds.

Mid-March, and a change of culinary tune was needed more than ever; something to provide a little zest as the gloom continues, with rain added in for good measure.

Early Saturday morning, pre-market, was invested in swotting both Mimi Sheraton’s The German Cookbook and Elisabeth Luard’s European Peasant Cuisine.

On the one hand, Germany is beckoning loud and clear now. After months of procrastination brought on by both a complex work schedule and underlying panic, the last week has seen bookings finally made. Lübeck, here I come!

My first solo trip outside the UK might have had to wait until my 51st year, but now it is looming, less than a month away.

Of which much more in due course.

In the meantime, back to yesterday morning’s culinary ruminations.

Sheraton’s is a remarkable book, thorough and packed with culinary history. But it's not particularly easy to actually cook from. So for instance, I’ve put off trying frikadellen for ages on the basis that her recipe contains so many ingredients.

I’ve had these little burgers ready-made from Lidl in the past, but really wanted to make my own. A spot of Googling served to reveal that they can be much simpler than something like 18 ingredients.

But that’s for another day.

In the meantime, before the onslaught of Germanophilia, a change was still required. And it came via Luard’s wonderful book.

Like Sheraton, Luard's scholarship is a joy – with the added bonus of a deliciously dry but light writing style. The answer to my need came in the shape of a French classic, chicken and 40 cloves of garlic.

Now if you don't like or aren't used to garlic, that's going to sound like a vast amount, but long, slow cooking makes it beautifully soft and sweet.

It's an easy dish.

Take your cloves of garlic – it's about three large bulbs – but don't peel them. Pop them in the bottom of a good, solid cooking pot and add about half a wine glass of olive oil.

Ready for the oven.

Take your bird and wipe it inside. Season and place on top of the garlic before adding more oil 7 the same amount again – on top of the bird. Just olive oil ordinaire, of course - not virgin.

Pop a lid on and, if it isn't a really good tight fit, Luard suggests sealing the pot with flour and water paste. I used my Le Creuset, with a sort of cartouche of foil over the top before the lid was placed on top.

And then it's into the oven at 170˚C (fan) for half an hour before the heat is turned down to 160˚C for around another 45 minutes.

Luard suggests serving it with toasted slices of bread, onto which you can then squeeze the garlic.

Unfortunately, I have a combination oven and grill, and there is no toaster in the place, but a sliced, decent-quality baguette is perfectly good.

And it was served with a salad of frisée lettuce, endive and watercress, with a dressing of white wine vinegar, olive oil, seasoning and grain mustard.

The chicken skin doesn't brown, but in this case, no matter: the meat is moist and wonderfully tender.

And given that there were just the two of us, there was plenty left over. My lunch tomorrow will involve some of the meat, plus a dressing made from the jelly that was left over, reduced and then whisked with the juice of half an orange.

For a jaded appetite in need of a lift, it was the perfect thing – not least the salad: how do I forget that salad is not just a summer thing?

Then today, I roasted a rolled and boned piece of pork shoulder.

The oven was set for 180˚C (fan). Sage leaves were pressed into the rolled meat and the scored skin rubbed well with coarse salt.

It had half an hour at that temperature, before the oven was turned down to 160˚C, a little boiling water added to the dish, and a peeled, cored, chunked Bramley apple tossed with liquid and fat, before the meat was put back on top.

It had another 90 minutes like that, with par-boiled spuds tossed in melted lard and popped in alongside after an hour.

On the side, tender stem broccoli.

Apart from sausages and mince and the very occasional gammon steak, I tend to avoid pork; fear, mostly: getting it too dry can be an issue after all.

But this worked well, was tasty and well cooked, not dry but with crispy skin – and like yesterday's chicken was a welcome change from a diet that seems to have been largely the same, week after week, as the second half of winter has dragged on.

And of course, could there be anything much more German than a bit of pig? Well, I'm going to start exploring that cuisine a little in the coming days.

Two seasons, two days, two dishes

For all that the sun has had his hat on several times this last week, the evenings are pulling in and the air is cooling.

It is an inescapable fact that autumn is on the way. And it seems that the record-breakingly wet summer, combined with the late burst of sun and heat, could conspire to produce a spectacularly colourful season.

But while we have a while to wait before we see whether that technicolour explosion actually transpires, an itch has started for seasonal comforts on the plate.

And the weekend gone provided opportunities and encouragements to straddle two seasons in just two days and two meals.

With tomatoes both ripe and ripening, a meal was needed that allowed them to take centre stage.

A pomodoro seemed to be the perfect casting solution.

But there was a complication, since doing a traditional tomato sauce requires far more tomatoes than I had.

There seemed to be one sensible way to deal with this.

So, for two, for a main course:

Take a medium onion and chop finely. Sweat gently in olive oil. Add some finely chopped garlic and continue to cook gently.

Chuck in a tin of chopped tomatoes – in just their own juice.

Let that cook gently for a while.

Check the seasoning.

Add the fresh tomatoes – mine were all small enough that they didn’t need cutting, let alone skinning.

Continue to cook gently until the skins have just split.

Serve over pasta.

Adding the whole tomatoes at the end freshens up the sauce and adds a different bit of texture.

It also allowed the chance to really appreciate the baby orange plums, which were light and sweet as anything. It’s almost a shock to the system to taste such tomatoey sweetness in the UK – and it was most welcome.

For Sunday, I’d decided to go down the slow, slow route.

So on Saturday evening, I sliced carrot and celery, cut some rump into large, bite-size pieces and popped everything in a bowl with a bottle and a bit of red wine, plus thyme, bay and juniper berries.

And it stayed like that until late Sunday morning.

The most fiddly part of the job that follows is draining everything – keep the marinade – and then drying the meat. But it’s worth taking a bit of time to make sure it is all dry.

Then take a cut clove of garlic and smear it around your casserole. Add a good knob of lard and melt.

Add the meat – in batches if necessary – and brown.

In the meantime, in a large pan, pop some diced, smoked streaky bacon, and cook gently until the fat is coming out of the meat.

At that point, add a couple of chopped onions and two or three cloves of garlic, and continue to cook gently until the onion and garlic start taking on a hint of gold.

Add a sliced carrot and a peeled, diced potato, plus two large tomatoes, skinned and chopped, and let it all cook gently for a minute or two.

Now add the marinade. Bring it to a boil and let it bubble and reduce a bit for five to 10 minutes.

Decant all of this into the casserole with the meat, and add further thyme and bay (and anything other herbs you fancy, for that matter).

At this point, I popped in a handful of dried mushrooms too. Then everything was brought back to a simmer, the pot was covered with foil and lidded, and placed into an oven that had been preheated to 120˚C, where it sat happily for around seven hours.

In essence, this is a daube. Strictly speaking, that means a particular type of cooking pot, but it’s come to mean a slow-cooked dish, of a style that’s particularly linked with the south west of France.

Previous experience had suggested that two or even four hours was not long enough to ensure that the gravy/sauce was sweet and the meat so tender that you could cut it with a spoon.

The majority of the recipe is from Elisabeth Luard, who suggests, in European Peasant Cookery, “four hours at least”.

I deviated from her recipe by adding the vegetables and herbs to the overnight marinade – and by adding the dried mushrooms later.

One of the joys of now having pretty much (as far as I know) every English-language book about cookery from the area is that you start being able to learn little details.

The dried mushrooms are popular in Foix in the mountains – we spent a couple of nights there last year. They also use white wine instead of red there, according to Paula Wolfert in The Cooking of South West France, but I decided to just take the mushroom aspect of that regional derivation.

We’d spent much of Sunday gardening and had trimmed a lot of herbs right back to encourage bushier growth. So when I put on some rice to serve with the daube, The Other Half suggested adding some of the mint he’d trimmed. To that I therefore added a finely-chopped orange chilli from the garden.

On Monday, it was simply a question of reheating gently for an hour and then serving with heaps of buttery puréed potato.

For yesterday, there was little meat left, but a very meaty and flavoursome gravy/sauce.

I chucked in a tin of chopped tomatoes, some halved, peeled spuds and some halved chestnut mushrooms, and gave it around an hour. And it did delightfully.

All of which also means four days of pretty easy cooking – and perfectly good eating. And what more can you ask for?

Roasted lamb, herbs and a windy garden

The Easter food didn’t stop with fish ‘n’ chips and pie, in case you were wondering – just as the weekend’s gardening didn’t stop with potting three small catnip plants.

For starters, there was the small matter of Sunday’s big dinner to celebrate the arrival of spring.

Roast lamb; there were no two ways about it – it just had to be roast lamb. Never mind the tradition thing: if it isn’t actually my favourite meat, it’s pretty near I and I’m struggling to think of what I’d actually put above it in such a list.

But in my dentally-challenged condition, would I be able to cope?

I had wondered about lamb meatballs or even a kleftiko, but I really did want my lamb to be roasted.

There was one possibility that came to mind, and Bill King – regular reader here and alumni of Darina Allen’s famous Ballymaloe Cookery School – supplied the technical data.

The answer was a long, slow cook to produce meat that was roasted but perfectly tender and still moist.

Bill recommended pre-heating the oven to 230˚C, putting the meat in, immediately reducing the temperature to 160˚C and letting it cook for four hours.

So that’s what I did – in essence.

Since I’ve got a fan oven, I initially checked to see what 230 would equate to, but since it was only about 190˚C, I just whacked the dial up as far as it went and then turned it down to the oven’s equivalent of 160˚C (150˚C) when the joint went in.

I’d picked up a lovely leg from Matthew on Broadway Market on Saturday and, after letting it come back to room temperature, rubbed some mint olive oil into the skin and seasoned it before cooking.

In the event, it didn’t get quite four hours – simply because it didn’t need it, as a little taste test after two and a half hours revealed.

It was served with new potatoes and peas (frozen at this point), both of which were cooked with a few sprigs of mint from the crop in the garden.

The meat was tender and moist, and had produced a glorious jus. Most important of all, it was utterly gorgeous.

And if anything it was almost better the day after, served cold with more new pots and peas. Wonderful.

So a big thanks to Bill.

It wasn’t the only use of fresh cropped herbs this weekend, mind.

Earlier on Monday, I’d carefully snipped sorrel leaves, flat leaf parsley and chives, washed them all – there were greenfly on the underside of all the sorrel leaves – and after chopping finely, added them to an omelette that was inspired by the descriptions of a childhood Easter day lunch in Elisabeth Luard’s European Festival Food.

It was delightfully tasty, with the bitterness of the herbs combining beautifully with the creamy egg. It looked pretty too, and it had the added benefit of offering cause to be very chuffed with my developing herbs.

All in all, it was a very simple Easter in food terms – but enormously satisfying.

And the gardening continued too. Indeed, it proved to be the weekend when I moved out of the comfort zone of pottering around, potting plants in the sunshine to the rather less dilletanteish business of potting plants under chilly cloud and with incipient rain in the air.

I’d mostly brought pretty things on the morning’s visit to Columbia Road, but not entirely.

There was the catnip and then some herbs for humans. In this case, more sage and some rosemary.

The sage was needed because the first lot had developed a sort of mould on the leaves. It had been one of the first things to be planted in the newly revitalised garden and I potted it using a substantial amount of very rich ‘manure’ (plant matter).

Now that had been perfect for the mint, but I suspect it had hampered the drainage for the sage.

This time, after the pot and the crocks were washed thoroughly, the crocks went back in, with some gravel and then followed by lots of sand and only a little compost. Let’s see if that sorts it.

The rosemary had finally been bought after the means to protect it from those shiny beetles had arrived. There was mesh pegs and rubber corners to build a bamboo cage.

Which all sounds wonderful, but isn’t really designed for a single pot, as I rapidly found out.

With help from The Other Half, a rather wobbly cage was improvised.

Unfortunately, by the next morning, it had collapsed. In a woeful comment on our efforts, it couldn't even cope with a spot of traditional March winds and April showers in brief combination.

And so, rather than leave it lying around, I donned a cap and went out into the wet to clear up. The rosemary is probably not under any major beetle threat in this weather, so I’ll look at possible solutions this coming weekend, when considering protecting the catnip.

But one of the things I’ve discovered in recent weeks is that I love potting things with my hands. Oh yes, they get messy and it’s absolute death to manicured nails and a pretty big challenge to my skin, but I really enjoy digging into the compost.

The smell and the feel is just so enjoyable. And doubtless there’s some rather airy fairy sense of being ‘in touch with Mother Earth’ that I could make too, but I’ll resist that temptation.

Oh. And one of the other things I’ve discovered is that box has a smell like cat pee.

And gardening is a learning curve.

So there. Don’t let me hear you saying that this blog isn’t educational.

Easter starts here – but what does it mean?

Of course Easter has really been going on for almost a week, but in reaching Maundy Thursday – as we call ‘Holy Thursday’ in the UK – I found myself wondering just what traditions existed for the day.

Most scholars appear to agree that the English word ‘Maundy’ has come to us through a combination of Middle English and Old French, from the Latin mandatum.

This is the first word of the phrase “Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos”.

You didn't think you were going to find yourself reading Latin here, did you?

Well, in case you can't translate it, it means: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you” and it's from John 13:34.

Now in the Bible, this was about Jesus washing the feet of the disciples and this has been ritualised by certain Christian denominations to see a priest or bishop wash the feet of 12 others during a mass.

On the other hand, some people believe the name of the day comes from the “maundsor baskets” or “maundy purses” of alms that the king of England distributed to certain poor at Whitehall before attending Mass on that day.

Of course, that explains why Brenda goes and hands out a bit of non-legal tender to some people at a church somewhere every Maundy Thursday. And did you know that the Maundy purses that HM gives away include a groat and a half groat?

Which won't help anyone much in these austere times.

Unrelated to such religious connotations is the good old fashioned wayzgoose.

Quite apart from being an absolutely fantabulous word, the wayzgoose started out as an entertainment given by a master printer for his workmen on or around St Bartholemew’s Day, which is 24 August.

That was partly because St Bart was the patron saint of leather workers and, therefore, book binders. It was also the end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight.

There is some speculation that the first wayzgoose bash was held in Mainz, Germany, at the Fust-Schöffer shop, after the first Gutenberg Bible had been printed – on 24 August, according to legend.

Later, wayzgoose came to refer to an annual dinner or outing for the staff of a printing works or the printers on a newspaper.

And in terms of the latter, it was often held on Maundy Thursday, since that was a day off because there would be no paper to print for the following day.

Back in the days I worked on a national newspaper, we regularly used to consider hiring a charabanc and going off on an extended pub crawl somewhere by way of marking a wayzgoose. But unfortunately, we never quite got around to it, and I don’t work in such an environment any longer.

But surely there’s some sort of Maundy food traditions?

Well, not really.

Some high-church Christians hold a form of seder – the traditional Jewish meal that starts the Passover – as this was what Jesus was doing at the Last Supper.

According to catholicculture.org, the centrepiece is a white, frosted cake that’s been moulded in the shape of a lamb.

You’ll also have the symbolic foods – matzos in memory of unleavened bread, some wine, bitter herbs, “greens” (parsley or watercress) with salt water to dip both these in, and haroses, a dish of apples, nuts, cinnamon and wine, which is chopped and mixed together to look like a mortar that the Hebrew slaves used.

You might also display the bone from a roasted leg of lamb – but you won’t have eaten any if you’re still strictly observing the Lenten fast. It symbolises the lamb the Israelites apparently sacrificed and ate on their departure from Egypt.

The bitter herbs is reflected in German culinary tradition, which sees either a chervil soup or a dish of eggs in green sauce – the sauce being made from a selection of herbs.

In fact, in Germany, Maunday Thursday is known as Gründonnerstag – ‘Green Thursday’, although the ‘grün’ bit might actually come from the word ‘greinen’, which means ‘to weep’.

But whatever the background, Germans often eat green-colored foods, such as the dishes mentioned above, on Gründonnerstag.

And that’s about it for Europe. Elisabeth Luard, in her European Festival Food doesn’t mention anything else, except an Hungarian paprika soup.

Indeed, for a festival that is preceeded by a month’s fasting, the main event seems pretty thin when it comes to big, set-piece meals to break that fast – apart from the lamb that I mentioned yesterday.

One of the few quirks to mention is that only us Brits apparently break the fast before Easter Sunday itself, with sweet, fruity hot cross buns being eaten before then.

So for the first evening of this short spring break, I don’t think there will be any food with a traditional meaning.

After the heatwave of last week, the temperature has dropped quite dramatically.

So tonight could well be something as warming and comforting as pie.

Cometh the hour, cometh the cassoulet

It was July. The weather had been mixed as we had trundled from Bordeaux to Carcassonne by train. It was late afternoon when we disembarked, with no obvious method of getting to the hotel other than Shanks's Pony, so we walked, using iPhone 'sat-nav' to guide us.

After checking in, we'd walked over the bridge to the village that lies beneath the plug of rock that bears La Cité itself. Everything was shut. Reluctantly, we adjourned to the hotel restaurant and, expecting nothing to match the view as night descended on the ancient city, ordered cassoulet.

It went way beyond our expectations. We'd had the tinned stuff before, but this was a first 'proper' taste of a treasure of French regional and national cuisine.

Two days later, when we boarded a train for the mountains, we took with us a carefully wrapped cassole, the traditional earthenware cooking pot for the cassoulet.

Back home, in the autumn, I laid in duck confit, but the haricot bean - at the heart of this hearty dish - proved elusive. And then, just as the weather started its dip to the sort of temperatures one could expect in January in northern Europe, I found some.

The moment had arrived.

Cassoulet was, the great cook Prosper Montagné declared, "the god of south-western food" in France.

Initially, it would have been made with fresh broad beans, until white beans arrived from across the border in Spain in the 16th century. And the haricot had since become the established bean for the dish. It remains arguably one of remarkably few absolutely crucial ingredients.

This culinary adventure began in seemingly sensible manner - checking recipes in my own library.

I turned first to the version in Hot Sun Cool Shadow by Angela Murrills; then to one in Goose Fat & Garlic by Jeanne Strang and yet another in Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of South-West France.

Stephanie Alexander had produced her own version in Cooking & Travelling in South-West France, which was the last of my collection of books dedicated to that area - and, as far as I know, the only ones published in English.

If I was getting a little dizzy by now, it was but the start.

In French Country Cooking, the Roux brothers used pork and lamb and no confit. Joël Robuchon's version includes lamb shoulder and lamb neck, and involves topping the final dish with crushed melba toast mixed with parsley, which sounds close to heresy, if you ask me.

Bruno Loubet presents a simplified version in Cooking from l'Odeon, to be cooked not in a traditional earthenware pot, but in something like Le Creuset and presented at table in exactly that.

In The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery, Auguste Escoffier gives instructions for a cassoulet dominated by mutton and with the option of "goose or chicken".

In European Peasant Cookery, Elisabeth Luard's version is informed by her year living in the Languedoc and the instruction of her neighbour there.

And of course, we cannot forget the divine Mrs David, whose French Provincial Cooking goes into some detail about the history of the dish, as well as providing relatively straightforward instructions from a period when Toulouse sausage was something you could only hope to find in a very limited number of shops.

Culinaria France crams it all into a very terse recipe, while The Food of France, like Murrills, simplifies.

Larousse Gastronomique prefers far more detail, and quotes Montagné as having said that cassoulet could be divided into three types - a 'Trinity'.

The 'Father' came from Castelnaudary. The oldest version, it included pork - loin, ham, leg, sausages and fresh rinds - with "perhaps some fresh goose".

The 'Son' of Carcassonne used leg of mutton and, in the shooting season, partridge.

The 'Holy Ghost' of Toulouse uses the same ingredients as in Carcassonne, but in smaller quantities and with the addition of "fresh lard, Toulouse sausage, mutton and duck or goose".

These are the main versions, but as Larousse makes clear, it is far from being a finite list. There is even a salt cod version, with the fish replacing the duck or goose.

But while this so clearly reveals its peasant roots, the French being the French, there has had to be some formalising of what was already a classic - well beyond its home region - into an institution.

In 1966, the États Généraux de la Gastronomie française decreed that a cassoulet had to be made up of at least 30% pork (which could include sausage), mutton or preserved goose, together with 70% haricot beans and stock, fresh rinds, herbs and flavourings.

All of which still leaves things about as clear as mud for the beginner.

So, which path did I follow?

In the end, it was largely Luard, with hints from Robuchon and David.

Prep had started yesterday with the beans. I usually use tinned ones, so I was grateful to read on the packet that 40g of dried haricot would turn into 80g of cooked pulses, which is generally regarded as a 'portion'. Seeing 80g weighed out, I decided to add another 20g for good measure. These was then decanted into a bowl with plenty of cold water and left overnight.

And so to this afternoon.

The pulses were rinsed, drained and popped into a large pan with plenty of cold water, a peeled and sliced carrot, a stick of sliced celery, an onion studded with two cloves, a sachet of bouquet garni, six crushed garlic cloves and the small amount of pork fat Matthew had been able to give me yesterday.

It's heated quickly and then, just before it starts to boil, the temperature is reduced to leave it barely simmering. And so it stays for an hour.

In the meantime, the meats are prepared. Now, this was dinner for two people with smallish appetites, so I'd got a small piece of lean pork, which I diced, plus two Toulouse sausages.

One of the confited duck legs was placed, dripping, into a frying pan, where it gave off all of it's coating of creamy fat, before being removed to a plate. Then the pork and the sausages were fried in this fat, together with another four crushed garlic cloves.

The duck leg was stepped of its flaking meat; the sausages were sliced thickly. A diced onion was cooked in the fat after the meats had all been removed.

Don't throw the fat away - you need it later.

Next up, skin, deseed and chop a large, beefy tomato.

Heat your oven to 120˚C.

When the beans are ready, strain. Get rid of the vegetables and bouquet garni. Keep the pork fat.

Take your pot/casserole and put the fat in the bottom, fat side down. The theory is that, starting with some beans, you layer the ingredients. For just two of us, that meant a layer of beans, then everything else forming on thick layer, to be topped with more beans.

Oops. A problem. There were nowhere near enough haricot to top the dish. It was rather too late to contemplate a minimum four-hour soak for more beans, followed by an hour simmering.

I cheated in the only way possible, rinsing of a tin of cannellini beans and using them to fill in the gaps.

The dish is covered (with foil, if you don't have a lid) and placed in the oven for two hours. Check a couple of times and, if the beans look a little too dry, add a little boiling water.

After two hours, remove from the oven and turn up the heat to 160˚C. Spread a layer of breadcrumbs over the top and drizzle with the melted goose/duck fat from the duck confit that you'd reserved.

Leave the lid off and pop back in the oven. Give it 30 minutes, by which time it should have a nice, golden crust, then remove and stir the breadcrumbs gently into the beans. Back in the oven it goes for at least another half an hour.

The key here is patience. But every 10 to 15 minutes, give it another stir.

This breaking the crust is considered to be really authentique: they do it seven times in Castelnaudary and eight in Toulouse. It's now been set at three times in Hackney.

Remove, serve and eat.

For a first effort, I was very pleased. It wasn't perfect - the shortage of haricot being an obvious point. But I'd also be inclined to increase the initial bean cooking time by 30 minutes, as suggested in at least one recipe, to ensure they're just a little softer.

And the pork and sausages need to be cooked initially for a shorter time but at a higher heat.

But that apart, I was chuffed. My first effort was no insult to the lovely, half-glazed dish that has graced the kitchen since our return last August. And it certainly won't be long before I give it another go.

In a stew about gravy

Some things are best forgotten; left well hidden in the attic of memory, buried away behind the other clutter.

But memories, no matter how deeply interred, have a habit of popping up unexpectedly and coming back to haunt you.

Slouched in an armchair on a Sunday afternoon, wind rattling the plane trees outside, i was delighting to the joys of Nigel Slater's Eating for England, when a brief section suddenly threw the words 'gravy granules' out from the page and directly at me.

From the tender comforts of nostalgia for custard creams and mint cracknel - the latter of which I hadn't hear of in years, the former of which the same book has had me wanting instantly - I found myself slapped across the face by the wet fish of embarrassing memory.

I have to admit that there was a time when the kitchen cupboard housed tubs of beef, chicken and vegetable gravy granules.

That was bad enough, but then more detail flooded through: memories of serving Birds Eye frozen chicken burgers (the breadcrumbed ones, not those with something like Rice Crispies over them).

I felt mortified at the thought. But at least it serves as an illustration of what a difference a decade or so can make.

Mr Slater has a lot to answer for. But he also provided me with the roots of an interesting challenge this weekend.

The first chapterette in the aforementioned book talks of stew - of the great English stew a creation of diced meat, diced vegetables, a jug of water and a bay leaf, all of which comes together as something that is, almost at best, bland.

He compares it, pithily, to the casserole traditions of France, Italy and Spain, with the addition of booze (in the first case, at least) and the use of various herbs and spices.

Returning to the attic of memory - but deliberately this time, and with care - I rooted around for memories of maternal stews.

She cooked a stew rarely and, when she did, it was on a Saturday for a late lunch: it would have some meat of other, together with assorted veg, pearl barley and liquid.

I remember nothing more specific - except the slices of bread that we mopped up with at the end.

As I've mentioned before, she didn't believe in onion - not in an atheistic way, of course, but I have never known her have one in the house, whether a cooking onion ordinaire, one of the red variety or even the milder shallot.

Her culinary belief system did seem to understand that onions were occasionally required, but that was achieved by rehydrating some Whitworths dried fragments in an old, enamelled tin mug and then popping it in the cooking pot.

Well a least that's how I remember things - and I'm not getting the ladder back out and going back into that attic right now to see if I can find more detail.

But all this set me to considering a stew for Sunday, instead of the pot roast I had been contemplating as a way of christening the Le Crueset oval casserole.

I wanted to cook without any specific recipe, but that didn't mean a lack of research before I stepped into the kitchen this afternoon.

Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Food offered clues in a number of recipes for classic dishes that seemed a tad more authentic than most versions I'd seen before.

For instance, meat was usually caramelised in lard or dripping instead of the currently obligatory 'healthy' option of oil - Which? magazine actually once criticised a Rick Stein book for including dishes involving cream and butter.

And the cooking time was also often considerably longer than I'd usually seen: for instance, I'd never seen a recipe for a daube that saw it cooked for four hours at 120˚C. That was information that I stored for use.

I've also got poor - albeit gradually improving - understanding of cuts of meat. More research suggested that for such a dish, I should use blade (or chuck, as it's also) known. Sure enough, Matthew had some.

It was beautiful meat, delightfully marbled (see picture at the top). This afternoon, I cut it into pieces (large bite size) and then diced onion, celery and carrot - the holy trinity of the mirepoix - plus parsnip.

The meat was browned in dripping first, then removed and replaced with the vegetables.

Once they were softened and a little golden, a tablespoon of plain flour was added, stirred in and allowed to cook through for. Minute, before I started deglazing with Wychwood's Scarecrow organic golden pale ale.

Once it had stopped thickening, I added a couple of springs of thyme, some seasoning and then the meat, topping up the liquid to just cover.

Then it went into the pre-heated over at 115˚C, since I was using a fan oven.

After tasting on 90 minutes, it was a rather bitter - but not in the way the beer would have been if you'd been drinking it out of a glass. I sprinkled in a little demerera, drizzled on a little Maggi sauce, stirred in a decent squirt of tomato purée and turned up the temperature about five degrees. An hour later, this seemed to have sweetened matters - a little.

Later still, something hit me: all the remaining bitterness had gone, leaving something with lovely layers of developing flavour, a general sweetness at the front and a hint of sourness later.

In the past, I've wondered whether I've done something wrong when I've tried meat 'n' beer dishes: they always seemed to have that bitterness. Is that really what the Flemish intended with the traditional carbonade?

The problem, I now realise, is that most modern recipes in the UK seem to regard 'long, slow cooking' as meaning two hours at the max. Presumably, British cooks are assumed to be somehow incapable of cooking anything for any longer – are we too impatient?

For the final 45 minute's cooking, I added dumplings, made of self-raising flour, mustard powder, shredded suet, seasoning, chopped parsley and a little chilled water.

Having left this dish for over four hours, it took a mere one bite to realise that there's a substantial difference when you seriously cook for longer.

I've been curious about slow cooking for some time, but had been struggling to find recipes that seemed to involve anything that was genuinely slow – apart from a Heston Blumenthal belly pork dish that took nine hours.

What a shame I hadn't bothered studying Luard's book earlier and in more detail! With the feeling that I've enjoyed a really tasty success today, I'm going to be studying the book further and actually trying some of the specific recipes - not the least the daube. No wonder my previous efforts have never tasted as I know, in my gut, the dish should!

Ideas from a pile of books

There's no doubt that it has been the most foodie-based festive season I’ve ever had.

First, my birthday produced the Kenwood iMix, plus Roberta Muir’s 500 Cheeses. And following hot on the heels of those came Escoffier: The King of Chefs by Kenneth James, together with the great man’s Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery and Joël’s Complete Robuchon, plus Elisabeth Luard’s European Peasant Cuisine.

That’s not forgetting The Stornaway Black Pudding Bible by Seumas MacInnes and Bob Dewar, plus one of those irresistible Amazon deals to netted me Eggs, Pastry and Sauces by Michel Roux for a ridiculous bargain price.

And then there was the recently arrived Bistro Bruno: Cooking from l’Odeon.

There has not, thus far, been a copy of Why Bible-believing Methodists Shouldn't Eat Black Pudding by Stephen B Dawes. Not that I recall black pudding being proscribed at home.

But anyway, it’s all very well having such books, but I don’t have a coffee table, so now I have to start putting some of the culinary wisdom contained in them into practice. They’re not meant for decoration – and particularly not the Escoffier and Robuchon, which are such serious cookery books that they don’t even have illustrations. Gulp.

First up was an idea for dessert from the Roux Eggs book: a coffee-flavoured custard, baked in a caramel-lined ramekin, chilled, and topped with sugar that’s then burnt with a little cook’s blow torch.

I’ve done custards before, so that wasn’t too daring. And indeed, if anything, the instructions made it seem slightly simpler than some previous ones.

I’ve only done caramel a couple of times and it’s one of those things that astonishes you with the speed at which it sets. I barely had enough time to get the golden liquid spread over the base of three ramekins and a tiny bit up the wall of one, before it had ceased to be liquid.

How experienced cooks do it – and particularly when they have more pots than my meagre three to fill – I’m really not sure.

Anyhow, after the caramel had set and cooled, I made a custard, with a teaspoon of decent coffee granules in it. Once decanted into the ramekins, these were baked in a dish that was lined with baking parchment and had hot (not boiling) water added to half way up the ramekins.

The oven temperatures in the book are apparently for a fan oven – I still needed to give the custards another few minutes over the stated 45 in order to ensure that a sharp knife came away clean after being inserted.

Once they’d cooled, they went into the fridge to chill. Later, to serve, they were topped with sugar and blow-torched. The result was divine – and it’s almost seems like a miracle: that the caramel that I’d seen with my own eyes setting to rock-like hardness on the inside of the ramekins is lusciously liquid once you break beneath the surface.

Not that I was the only one who liked it. I'd left a third one for today, partly to photograph (and then consume, of course). I turned my back for one moment – and there was Otto checking it out. Apparently, it's pretty darned good for discerning cats too.

The next thing I attempted yesterday was from the Robuchon: a gratin of potatoes and leeks to accompany the boiled ham with sour brown shallot sauce.

Perhaps what you expect with Robuchon is extreme cheffiness. Well, it is there – scallops with fresh ginger, for instance, would be in such a bracket, I think. But many of the dishes are really straightforward and not flashy in any way. This was an example.

For two people, I took a medium onion, peeled and sliced it into rounds of approximately 3mm thickness. Then I did the same with a leek and a couple of spuds.

The Other Half rolled his eyes when, reading the recipe, he noted that Robuchon calls for a bouquet garni to be made out of thyme, parsley and bay leaves, wrapped and tied in a piece of leek.

He rolled his eyes even more when I showed him that I’d done exactly that! It might sound posy, but if you’ve got the leek, then why not? Saves using muslin or cheesecloth or something like that.

You soften the onion and leek in a little butter, then add around 700ml of milk, a little grated nutmeg, salt and pepper, the sliced potatoes and the bouquet garni, and cook gently for around 35 minutes – or until a knife glides easily into the potato.

Heat your grill. Pour the milky mix carefully into a buttered dish and pop under the heat for around 10 minutes or until it’s starting to turn golden.

It needed a bit of extra seasoning, but that is a tasty side dish that’s far from difficult or fancy. And it went very nicely with the ham.

So, a good start to life with all my new cookery books. A one that will prompt plenty of further experimentation, I don’t doubt.

So what's the new peasant cuisine?

First – I’m sorry that this wasn’t the “tomorrow” that was promised on Sunday, but a nasty cold is to blame for laying me too low to do much of anything – let alone think!

But this is an appropriate day for this second article, since there’s a Panorama investigation into supermarkets on BBC1 at 9pm this evening.

Anyway …

I don’t have any concrete memory of the word ‘peasant’ until the time, in my late teens, when we lived in Lancaster and my mother would use it derisively of an elderly Polish couple who lived next door.

Which is all the more ironic because, as my knowledge of such matters increases, it’s easy to see that her own choice of husband comes from something little removed from the peasantry: a family that had a little bungalow in rural, rural Cornwall (there was a village squire – I kid you not), with no electricity, no hot running water (I actually remember sitting in an old tin bath in front of the fire) and in the rambling garden, chickens and rabbits for food.

My paternal grandfather was also a road mender (his wife an occasional barmaid) who was so short-sighted that the limits of his service in WWII was the Home Guard: he was a very quiet man, but always laughed at Dad’s Army relishing how true it apparently was.

I have no memories of my maternal grandmother’s cooking, but I assume it was basic.

But if we’re using Elisabeth Luard’s definition of peasant cuisine, therefore including working class dishes where there has been no peasantry for centuries, then what is the ‘peasant cuisine’ of today?

For working people, the choice of food is primarily governed by time.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a trained cook – and she’d continued to undertake further training and get qualifications throughout her working life, not resting on her laurels – who was made redundant from the old people’s home in which she worked when the council decided to sell it to a private developer.

She was in her 50s. She struggled to get any sort of a job – and ended up doing three cleaning jobs just to make ends meet. Her husband – who had retired from the fire service after a serious accident – was struggling on as a school caretaker, in the fairly certain knowledge that he will end up in a wheelchair.

She actually enjoys cooking, but is frequently so exhausted when she gets home at night that a take-away is all she’s capable of organising before dozing off on the sofa. And besides, it’s often so late in the evening that her husband has already had his own meal.

Where is the quality of life in this? Is this really the apotheosis of a supposedly civilised society in the 21st century?

Perversely, we now seem to be moving into an era where those people who could be described as the ‘working poor’ are vilified and blamed for their own condition.

The ‘logic’ appears to work something like this:

‘If you’re on a low income, get the training/education to get a better-paid job’.

Obviously this means that:

• there are no shortage of such jobs (as my interviewee, mentioned above, who had continued to get improve her CV, discovered);

• anyone in a job with low wages deserves to be there and to be on low pay (and, concomitantly, with a crap standard of living/quality of life).

The latter rather ignores the point that the overwhelming majority of jobs are not acts of charity: they exist because there is work that needs to be done. So someone will always have to do it. In which case, they are saying that someone will always deserve to have a shitty standard of living/quality of life.

Again – and this demands to be repeated: do we live to work? Or do we work to live? Which should it be?

And if it is the former, then why? Who or what is the work that dominates our lives for?

To clarify a point slightly (and I feel I shouldn’t have to make this, but it’s best to do so for fear of any misunderstanding): I do not mean that every worker gets the same pay, right across the spectrum of jobs.

But let’s put it another way: in the UK at present, the median wage is around £21K. Sound a lot?

Okay. The average cost of a house is £246,387. Now, in the days before the chronic housing shortage and the boom in prices that inevitably followed (and the banks deciding to offer increasingly dangerous mortgages to people who were desperate to get a home), it was considered sensible to have a mortgage that was no more than three times your annual household income.

So, to buy a property at the current average price, you’d need a joint (or single) income of over £82K. Or to put it another way, that median wage, applied to a sensible mortgage, would get you a property of £63K.

Most women – certainly in the UK – have little choice these days about whether they want to work or stay at home after having a child. The sort of financial realities sketched out above make it Hobson’s Choice.

So it could be argued that we need fast food and convenience food to help sustain the economy as it currently exists.

This is actually something that Stewart Lee Allen touches on in In the Devil’s Garden. Personally, I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories, preferring instead to apply Occam’s Razor whenever possible. And the idea that, in effect, government has ‘encouraged’ a culinary culture of supermarkets, ready meals, take-aways etc, as a way of those time-short workers feeding themselves and their families, is not one I like or feel comfortable with.

But the reality in the UK is that, for many, many people, their food ‘choices’ are now limited what they can pile into the trolley, and then into the car and then into the freezer at the weekend.

It is, in this ‘post-industrial’ landscape, quite handy when people will apparently happily spend money on mass-produced rubbish, from Lancashire hot pots that require pectin to ‘beers’ that are full of chemicals; just as it’s handy that many people have come to believe that quality of life is measured in terms of how much they can buy.

It would be more than a little awkward if that were not the case.

Yet we have increasing obesity – particularly in childhood – with the concomitant diseases that go with it. And there’s no connection to the diet that people are increasingly consuming?

Decreasing numbers of families sit and eat together, but spread out around a home, in front of the telly or the computer etc, with their own food. And there are plenty of commentators who apparently think we have increasing family breakdown and an inability amongst young people in particular to learn social skills and relate to people outside their own peer group.

We have town centres that have become no-go areas for families and older people at nights and weekends, when young people in particular (with a lack of social skills – so they find it difficult to comprehend why there is anything wrong with their being as noisy as they want, regardless of where they are and anyone else) arrive for a night’s drinking in industrialised drinking establishments.

When you think of it like this, it’s easy to see why no real changes are attempted.

And it’s easier to build more and more supermarkets, and encourage people to believe that ready-meals and junk food are cheaper than real food, than it is to deal with the equation of low pay and a high cost of living that forces many people to take two or three jobs at the same time.

Or of dealing with the whole question of quality of life and work-life balance.

Do we really live to work? Or do we work to live? Which should it be? When you look at the political decisions made in the UK over the last 30 or so years, primarily that of moving us to a ‘post-industrial’ economy, you can see, for such a post-industrial economy to work, what the answer has to be (for ‘them’, at least).

Against this background, how odd that Lancashire hot pot is something that you might (if lucky) find in a gastro pub now – although such an approach is considerably later than the French taking their peasant cuisine and moving it into the restaurant … think duck confit, for instance.

The new ‘peasant cuisine’ in the UK is either fast and take-away food or over-packaged, pre-made, ‘ready’ meals – supposedly cheap but not really, but which offer people ‘convenience’ and big business ever increasing profits, at the same time as destroying town centres and communities, and aspects of our culture.

One is left with a question: we’ve been on this path for some years – but where does it lead?

The time for peasant cuisine is now

A couple of days ago, a copy of European Peasant Cookery by Elisabeth Luard landed on my doormat, courtesy of m’friend George.

Peasant cuisine has provided the roots of what we now think of as rather posher food; dishes that we choose when we dine out, spending good money in smart restaurants.

But of course the UK hasn’t had a peasantry for centuries, since Enclosure and the deliberate de-forestation of the country, which were carried out with the intention of driving people off the land and into the industrialising urban areas.

Which doesn’t mean that Luard neglects the UK. She includes, for instance, Lancashire hot pot, as well as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, Welsh cawl, Scotch broth and many more.

In other words, traditional dishes of the British working class.

As it happens, she doesn’t include a recipe for pea and ham soup – which I decided would be perfect fodder for the weekend, for a number of reasons.

Both The Other Half and I, along with assorted colleagues at work, have come down with coughs and colds. In my case, yesterday afternoon I coughed so much that it felt as though a herd of baby elephants had stampeded across my torso. And back again.

But we’re also in the middle of another ‘cold snap’. With snow already lying thinly on the ground overnight, yesterday began with a gentle flurry of the white stuff drifting down. As I shopped, however, it turned into the closest thing I’ve seen to a blizzard since living on the edge of the Pennines over 30 years ago. The Other Half, looking out from the comfort of our living room, donned outer clothing and headed up to find and help me. Most welcome it was too.

A week earlier, I’d seen that the Longwood Butchers van on Broadway Market had ham shanks for £4. And in the intervening days, I’d found an old family recipe that, a long time ago, I’d faithfully and neatly copied onto the back of one of my father’s used orders of service, then folded away and popped into a notebook.

Now I’ve cooked Erwtensoep, the Dutch version, before, but never the English version, and now seemed the perfect moment to break that culinary duck. As it happens, I altered it a bit. But then again, there are no absolutes for cooking such dishes – simply as many different versions as there are people who have cooked them.

I soaked the ham for a couple of hours, together with a box of quick-soak peas.

Then it was into the pot with everything and water to cover. Well, not quite. Given the size of pots I have, plus the size of the ham itself, that would have meant a lot of water and probably nowhere near enough peas. So I lidded the pot and allowed the top of the meat to start off by steaming, turning it occasionally.

It needs to be cooked gently anyway or the peas will stick to the bottom of the pan and make a dreadful mess.

After a couple of hours, I added sliced carrot and parsnip. The recipe had said a grated carrot, but this was what I felt in the mood for.

It had another long, slow cook, so that the veg were pretty much broken down. And then we had big bowls of the stuff.

Hearty and warm and hardly unhealthy.

And you remember the price of the ham? £4. One 250g packet of Batchelors Quick Soak Dried Peas was a whopping 35p. I’m afraid I cannot recall the cost of two carrots and two parsnips or the water. But we'd barely be looking at a fiver in total.

We both had a good bowl last night. We have also had a good bowl tonight (the colds are not leaving us feeling ambitious, from a culinary point of view) and anyway, as might be expected, it had actually improved with keeping.

There’s still enough left for lunch tomorrow.

This is not expensive food. It is good food; it is real food. But it is not expensive food.

Out of interest, four 400g cans of Heinz pea and ham soup from Tesco are currently on offer for £3 (usual price 82p per can). Mind, for that money, you’re actually getting:

“Water, Split Green Peas (21%), Peas (5%), Potatoes, Reformed Ham (3%, Pork (72%, Water, Whey Powder (from Milk), Salt, Emulsifiers – Tri, Poly and Diphosphates, Dextrose, Preservative – Sodium Nitrite), Onions, Carrots, Cornflour, Modified Cornflour, Celery, Salt, Flavourings (contain Wheat, Barley), Vegetable Oil, Sugar, Cream, Dried Skimmed Milk, Spice, Colour – Beta-carotene, Stabiliser – Polyphosphates and Sodium Phosphates.”

Damn. My recipe missed out most of those. But trust me, a can of soup like that is not a substantial meal – no, not even at one can per person. I had a can of Baxter’s pea and ham soup earlier this month during my previous chill/cold – these colds seem to have induced a bout of nostalgia – so I do speak with the benefit of recent experience.

Now, I’m lucky in that I have easy access to a butcher who will do things like suddenly have ham shank available – and for a damned decent price.

Most people are not so lucky: in that same post about Lancashire hot pot, I mentioned that Tesco itself, for all it has bemoaned the slow demise of classic English dishes, was also one of a number of supermarket chains that have helped to create a rate of local butchers dying out of rate of 23 a month (survey, reported in the Telegraph in 2008). Few people are as lucky as I am to have the choice.

Extending the research a bit, I did another little search on the Tesco site. I came up with the following result:

“We did not find any products to match 'ham shank'.”

Somehow, I’m not surprised. Nor, incidentally and in the interests of fairness, does Waitrose. Or Asda. Sainsbury's translates 'ham shank' into 'lamb shank'. I'm not registered with Morrison's and cannot check.

Carrying on with the research, I found that Tesco’s basic “Lancashire Hotpot” is £2.90 for 450g. So, that’d be around £11.60 for a family of four.

The list of ingredients is more complex than anything that Luard or my book of Lancashire recipes comes close to:

“Marinated Lamb (28%), Potato, Carrot, Onion, Water, Vegetable Juices From Concentrate, Lamb Stock, Vegetable Oil, Cornflour, Wheat Flour, Tomato Purée, Garlic Purée, Salt, Pepper, Rosemary, Marinated Lamb contains, New Zealand Lamb, Water, Cornflour, Tomato Purée, Salt. Potato contains, Potato, Vegetable Oil. Vegetable Juices From Concentrate contains, Carrot, Celeriac, Lettuce, Beetroot, Spinach, Parsley. Lamb Stock contains, Lamb Stock, Yeast Extract, Sugar, Salt, Cornflour, Onion, Rosemary, Thyme.”

Those of a nervous disposition may wish to look away now, because I am on the verge of a ‘what-the-fuck!?!?’ moment.

Actually, the hell with it. Let’s have some fun. Tesco also sell an own-brand “Finest" hot pot ("Finest" is that chain's top range). Again, this is 450g, but this time it retails for £4.25 per serving (so, £17 for the proverbial four-person family).

Let’s have a little look what all that extra moolah gets us:

“Potato (38%), Lamb (36%), Carrot, Celery, Onion, White Wine (3.5%), Leek, Vegetable Oil, Lamb Stock, Cornflour, Redcurrant Jelly, Chicken Stock, Wheat Flour, Yeast Extract, Gelling Agent, Salt, Thyme, Rosemary, Black Pepper, Barley Malt Extract. Lamb Stock contains, Lamb, Salt, Sugar, Cornflour, Onion Concentrate, Rosemary Oil, Thyme Oil. Redcurrant Jelly contains, Glucose-Fructose Syrup, Redcurrant Juice, Sugar, Gelling Agent. Chicken Stock contains, Chicken, Sugar, Water, Salt, Cornflour, Onion Concentrate, Chicken Fat. Yeast Extract contains, Yeast Extract, Salt. Gelling Agent, Pectin.”

Hey … look at that! More potato than in the cheap version – in fact, more potato than there is lamb (although there is more lamb than in the cheapo one)! No tomato purée, but loads of lovely cornflour and pectin. Pectin? What on Earth is pectin doing in a bloody hotpot – pectin is what occurs naturally in fruits and what is used to set jams. And who puts sugar in a stock?

Next time I make a Lanky hot pot, I’ll make a note, to the very last penny, of what it costs. But I make you a promise now: it will not come even close to £4.25 per serving. And it will have good meat and good kidneys in it. And it will be rather bigger servings than the amount mentioned above (which is only 50g more than a tin of soup).

And tomorrow, if you’re not bored to tears already, I’ll attempt to explore what I am coming to believe ‘peasant cuisine’ means in the UK today.